The Farms

So since this entire thing seems to have mostly blown over by now it might be possible to write about this without losing your head. Especially considering that almost no one will read this. On the off chance that someone does, please don’t take this too seriously. That being said, if you somehow managed to avoid this whole ordeal and therefore are oblivious to what Kiwi Farms, Keffals or Destiny is you can call yourself fortunate and it is probably for the best if you don’t find out. It’s not exactly pretty and also quite a niche issue. If you’ve been paying attention to this issue there won’t be anything new in this post apart from my uninformed opinion. You’ve been warned, now let’s see why someone would want to farm kiwis and how doing so led to a campaign that tried to attack the weakest points of the Internet.

Part 1: The site

Over the years the Internet and its users have slowly moved away from certain ways of communicating and exchanging information. BBS and IRC are now mostly a thing of the past. Nowadays most people only use a hand full of services that provide them with news, entertainment and the means to communicate with others. So in that sense Kiwi Farms is a bit of an outlier, because it is a forum. There’s still plenty of those out there today, but they are slowly disappearing and shrinking in size, even though they provide obvious advantages over all the other mediums.

A forum is easily searchable, independent, customizable and can also usually be indexed by search engines. You’d therefore be a bit surprised to realize that you will get absolutely no suggestions if you type “Kiwi Farms” into Google. It’s almost as if the site doesn’t exist. The search will still give you results and sometimes even lead you to the actual website you were looking for, but for the most part it’s just articles talking about the site. This isn’t exactly new. Google has been “curating” search results for quite some time and even to the point where their search engine is in some cases at best incomplete and at worst straight up useless. If you ever look for something with Google and feel like you’re not finding what you’re looking for this might be the reason. This is just one of the many reasons why you would want to look for alternatives to Google, not just as a search engine but all of the services the company offers. However if you head over to DuckDuckGo or any other alternative site the results will not be much better. You might get suggested results and even the actual website somewhere within the first ten results, but beyond that it’s mostly other people talking about the site, which is strange considering how many pages the site contains that can be indexed and crawled. Part of this is probably to blame on the recent events but it’s also undeniable, that the results are not entirely accurate.

If you look at the graph on Google trends you will see that the interest regarding this site has increased drastically over the past weeks. If you take into account what results people get when searching for the site it’s safe to assume that most people searching for the site will walk away with a certain opinion.

So what is that site even about? Even though a lot of people have been searching for it it’s still safe to assume that the average Internet user probably still doesn’t know about it as the its main purpose is a bit strange and not something the average Internet user is interested in. However anyone who did look it up on Google was most likely greeted by headlines like “The End of Kiwi Farms, the Web’s Most Notorious Stalker Site” or “Anti-trans stalkers at Kiwi Farms are chasing one victim around the world. Their list of targets is growing.”. Now most should know by now that headlines hardly mean anything, but the content of the articles mostly matches the title in these cases. If you haven’t gotten the idea yet there’s also almost always a sidebar with the Wikipedia article of the site. The first few sentences from it are (currently) the following:

There’s definitely a clear picture being painted here. The question is whether this is accurate or not. Most of the recent articles read themselves as if they’ve all been written using a template. So instead of listening to them one could just visit the website, provided that it’s currently online, and see what the fuzz is all about. As of right now the site is using a special theme for Halloween and people are encouraged to use appropriate avatars. The “Featured Content” section currently contains the following items:

• Dream did a face reveal and people are comparing it to his old picture.
• Destiny published an exposé on Keffals.
• It is now October. Spooky avatars are mandatory.
• TransSalamander’s 2nd neovagina will be made from human cadaver skin. Are you ready to donate your body to science yet?
• welcome back

Each of these items links to a post in a specific thread and most of them sound pretty mundane. The only one that stands out is the second to last one, which links to a post that very thoroughly archives some tweet. One of them really does contain what the headline says. If you look at the different subforums you basically get more of the same. Some are dedicated to specific people, most notably Chris Chan and others to specific groups. Besides the featured content the worst you’ll see on the front page is the description of the subforums. So far nothing too special.

Since most of the recent attention is due to one person it’s also worth looking at the thread of Keffals. Null who is the administrator of the forum added some extra information to it, in the hopes that people would actually read it before writing articles or joining in on the social media campaigns. The thread starts with this prominent message:

Instead reading the thread it is way more likely that none of the journalists that wrote articles about the site ever even saw as much as the front page of the forum. Now that is partially because the site was not reachable multiple times over the last weeks. But if a journalist in the year 2022 is not capable of finding an archive of a site then he might need to rethink his career choice. Funnily, or rather sadly, enough this has gotten harder because of the campaign against the site. Now you could claim that this text was added to attempt damage control and that in reality the website actually does condone these things, but there’s not evidence for this and it can’t be proven. In fact there is usually a banner at the top of most pages that lists the rules, which always includes the following “No trolling plans”.

So ultimately we’re left with a forum that is quite obsessive about documenting and discussing the activities of other people on the Internet mostly to make fun of them. The site also offers subforums for other off-topic discussion, but the only thing you’ll find there that is worth mentioning is the fact that people use all kinds of slurs and insults very frequently. While I usually try not to resort to that kind of stuff sometimes calling someone a stupid fucking inbred mouthbreathing cataclysmically retarded troglodyte is the only way to properly express how stupid someone is acting. Since the amount of platforms where you can use insults so liberally are steadily decreasing I can’t really fault people for getting it all out on the few sites where they still can. This kind of stuff is also still very normal on sites like 4chan, so this can’t really be the reason why the site is disliked so much.

If you take a look at the “How is this site legal!?” page you’ll get a better idea of what gets the site in so much trouble:

Which is most likely why the whole campaign against the site never even tried to pursue the legal route. There’s also some more explanations on doxing, stalking, harassment, cyberbullying and defamation. They mostly boil down to:

It’s a lot of text, but it should get the idea across, whether or not I or others agree with this isn’t all that important. The topic of doxing is probably the most controversial. Privacy is very important online and offline and no matter how diligent you are if there is someone determined enough out there they will almost always dig up your address and similar information about you. So while not allowing this information to be posted on the site would be a way to combat it to a certain degree it wouldn’t help much. I personally think that posting people’s addresses, phone numbers, real names and other information isn’t okay, but as I’ve said it’s hard to stop it completely. There have been some threads about this on the forum to one of which Null has responded with

The responses in the thread aren’t completely clear, so it seems that some people are a bit conflicted on the topic. Ultimately most of us are mostly anonymous on the internet and doxing goes against this. All I can really say is that if I were the admin I’d personally not allow it or at least make certain information off limits, but I’m not going to tell Null how to run his site. Their stance on doxing probably gives off the impression to some people that the site lacks moderation, however it does in fact have a page dedicated to content that will be removed:

Which means that there is moderation and content does get removed, but almost always only in these specified cases.

So the site is definitely something that is apt to make a lot of enemies and I also don’t agree with some of these rules. The site also attracts a certain type of user that you hardly see anywhere else on the Internet, because most sites just ban a lot of things nowadays. All of this is rounded off with an administrator that calls himself “an insane person on the Internet with no assets”. He embodies the user base of the site fairly well and is notoriously stubborn and hellbent on keeping the site running as long as possible. If that wouldn’t be the case the site would’ve ceased to exist a long time ago. This also means that he makes the site an easier target with his behavior. The contact page of the site lists an email address for press inquiries with the description:

The last sentence is also what he sent to journalists that inquired him over the last weeks. Whether or not this had any impact in the grand scheme of things is hard to tell. It would’ve most likely not deterred most of the journalists from writing their articles in the way that they did, but at least they couldn’t have quoted him saying that the press is scum. However if the past weeks are any indication of what Null or Joshua has had to deal with in the past, his reaction to press inquiries shouldn’t be that surprising.

Without going too much into the details this is basically what the site is. It’s obviously not possible to sum it’s lengthy history up that quickly, especially if you’re like me and not an active user of it, but it should give a rough idea of it. Does the site contain a bunch of pretty hideous stuff? Yeah. Do people frequently use all kinds of slurs and insults? Sure. Is obsessively documenting, discussing and making fun of strange people on the Internet a rather questionable pastime? Pretty much. Does that justify the campaign that happened over the past weeks? I don’t think so.

Depending on whether you already have an opinion on all of this you might think that I’m giving Kiwi Farms and its users too much leniency. Maybe. There’s no thread about me on the forums and I’ve fortunately not been subject to any harassment online. I’m also not really the type of person to get a thread since I don’t post a significant portion my private life publicly on the Internet. The thing is that while the Farms might contain vile stuff, it’s all contained within their forum. Anything that happens on other platforms like Twitter doesn’t have anything to do with the site. After all the owners of a platform are not responsible for what the users post on their site and certainly not what someone posts on another platform. Especially considering that there’s usually no proof that a user on another platform is also a user of Kiwi Farms. Also as said before, the site makes it pretty clear that it does not encourage harassment. Above the textbox for new posts a user is usually reminded of the following:

The reminders that are shown differ depending on which subforum a user is in, but the one about trolling seems to be present in multiple cases. The point is that if you frequent the website you should know that engaging with the subject(s) of a thread is not encouraged and can end with you being laughed at. That obviously doesn’t mean that people don’t try and that it doesn’t happen, but you can’t point at the forum and say that it’s the (sole) reason it happened. Some admittedly unhinged people might get the idea that harassing the subjects of a thread or otherwise engaging with them would result in funny scenarios that can then be discussed and laughed at on the forums, but that does not seem to represent the majority of the user base or even the administrator of the site. While Joshua is definitely a character that doesn’t make it hard to dislike him on this topic he usually says something along the following: “When someone fucks up and does something stupid - that’s funny. When you go their house and beat them up it’s not”. I don’t know the exact quote and I’m too lazy to look it up, but the idea should come across.

So ultimately you’re left with a site filled with people that have a pretty weird hobby and get a laugh out of other people’s bad decisions. What should also be mentioned is that the site is a huge archive for people like Chris Chan. After gaining a lot of attention last year many started to watch the documentary on Youtube which would have basically been impossible if it weren’t for the Kiwi Farms and the CWCki. If the site would permanently disappear documentaries like the one about Chris could not exist. Some might say that that is for the better, but losing information is hardly ever a good thing. However the sheer amount of archived information also means that there are plenty of people out there who have a personal interest in getting their thread or the entire site removed.

Part 2: The Campaign

Now that we have a rough idea of what the site is about it’s time to look at what happened over the past weeks. It should be clear by now that a site like Kiwi Farms has a bunch of enemies. If you try to sign up you’ll see the following dialog, which makes that point clear:

There have been numerous attempts in the past to take the website down from different people. While I’m sure that some have attempted the legal route, the usual and also more effective strategy is to target other businesses that offer any kind of service to the website. Hosting is one of those services which has resulted in the forum moving between a lot of different providers. Nevertheless the website has always stayed up and as of right now is still accessible without much trouble. This is in large part due to the aforementioned stubbornness and determination of the administrator, which is - regardless of what you think about him as a person - admirable. The fact that this much determination is required to keep a website running that is legal, at least with my rudimentary understanding of U.S. law, is a quite concerning. Describing all the past attempts at taking the forum offline would make sense, but I do not know enough about the website to do so in detail. Some of the more recent ones include the attempt to seize the hard drives that contain the data of the forum and the cancellation of the Xenforo license which is the forum software that the website uses. There’s also people like Vordrak and regular DDoS attacks as well as the government of New Zealand. You get the idea, the site has enough enemies as it is.

If the site has already dealt with so many other issues you might wonder what was different this time. Once again the story is very lengthy and complicated unless you take what most articles have written about the campaign at face value. The name Destiny hasn’t really been mentioned yet, but he released a fairly thorough explanation of this campaign, which is a good place to start. Despite that I’ll roughly go through what happened anyways.

Keffals vs. Destiny

An important part of this story is the streamer Destiny getting banned on Twitch. I don’t recall exactly what it was for, but it is well known that the streaming platform hands out bans seemingly at random. Sometimes people get permanently banned for the most mundane things and others will repeatedly get only temporary bans to the point where streamers know that they can break rules and at worst get a little vacation. Regardless of what happened here the more important point is what happened after the ban took place. This is where a streamer named Keffals comes into play. Someone who at this point had only a very small following on Twitter. On the 23rd of March Keffals tweeted the following:

The following day this tweet was posted:

Naturally this attracts attention. The thread on Kiwi Farms was created on the 26th of March. While one rule is to not get angry or mad at the Internet it’s also not surprising that people want to dig up dirt about someone when said person is gloating over the fact that someone else got banned from a platform. And as it turns out there was a lot for them to dig through and so the thread quickly picked up the pace. This eventually results in Keffals finding the thread and Joshua mentioning the Destiny vs. Keffals drama in one of his streams. Keffals immediately finds out about this and responds to it with more tweets. And this is where everything basically spirals out of control.

The thread about Keffals contains a myriad of tweets, video clips, images and other stuff that shows that Keffals has a rather unlikeable character. There is way too much stuff to mention and a lot of it is just as if not more disgusting than what the average Kiwi Farms user posts. Others have said it before and it makes sense: Twitter and other social media sites contain and enable the same behavior and considering that they have way more users the volume of it is way higher than on Kiwi Farms. The only difference might be that the concentration on the Farms is a lot higher.

One of the things that the thread includes is Keffals’ connection to a website that contains information on how to obtain hormones for HRT. One of problems with this is that one of the people involved with the site seems to be very proud of instructing minors on how to do this. Keffals initially proudly announced a sponsorship for this website. However recently Keffals has ended the sponsorship and reacts a bit defensive to the topic:

Naturally Keffals has somewhat of an interest in having his thread disappear. Going after the entire site is a bit ambitious but it would also do the trick.

#DropKiwiFarms

A big part of the campaign was to blame the deaths of several people on the forum. Some of these people had threads about themselves on the site which is used to claim that the people were harassed by the Kiwi Farms and directly caused them to die. There’s no hard evidence for this, but if you want a thorough explanation you can either read the thread on Kiwi Farms or Destiny’s substack post. The thread about the #DropKiwiFarms campaign summarizes the events follows:

After this a website dedicated to the campaign is created. As previously stated the goal was not to pursue and win a legal fight but rather attack companies that the forum relies on to operate. The target in this case being Cloudflare. In addition to the website a protest was scheduled to further pressure the company into complying with their demand to stop providing their services to Kiwi Farms. Cloudflare being a very large company that offers a multitude of services one of them being DDoS protection. The setup of the Kiwi Farms is already pretty unique because of all the previous attacks that the site has undergone but it still used Cloudflare as a domain registrar and protection from DDoS attacks. While the complicated setup (from what I understand) technically allows attacks to bypass Cloudflare it’s still a useful service that can mitigate attacks and speed up loading times.

Around 20% of the Internet relies on Cloudflare and their services. Which isn’t a surprise considering that they offer some of them for free. One can argue over how this is possible and if the usual phrase “if it’s free, you are the product” applies, but this is not really the focus here. DDoS attacks are a fundamental problem on the Internet. They can be used to force any website or service offline and make it basically completely impractical or impossible to try and continue to operate the site in any meaningful manner. The biggest problem is that they stem form an imbalance. It is significantly cheaper organize a DDoS attack than it is to mitigate one. The former requires hardly any knowledge and a bit of spare money. The latter requires a large network of extremely expensive hardware as well as staff to operate it and software that runs on it. Cloudflare has all of that and very few other companies offer anything comparable. The big tech companies like Microsoft or Google have their own solutions which leaves all smaller businesses with only a small selection of providers to choose from and do business with. Therefore it’s not only pretty vicious to attack the site from this angel but it’s also extremely questionable.

This has happened in the past and Cloudflare has revoked their services from at least two other sites before. Those being 8chan and The Daily Stormer. If you look either of them up you’ll find out that Kiwi Farms looks like quite a tame place compared to them. I won’t go further into them as I know basically nothing about either sites. When Cloudflare issued their initial statement regarding the #DropKiwiFarms campaign they did however reference these two sites and said that revoking their service was a mistake. Not because Cloudflare supports the sites and their content, but because Cloudflare acknowledges their central role in mitigating attacks and protecting websites. Because of this they do not want to be one to decide who does and does not get protection since removing DDoS protection from a site leaves them vulnerable to all their enemies who are then free to attack it and therefore silence whoever operated and used the site. The statement was very coherent and formulated and also generally made sense. When they suspended services before they started to receive requests from other countries which demanded Cloudflare to suspend services for websites that belonged to human rights organizations. According to their statement these requests often used the same reasoning that Cloudflare used in their own statement regarding 8chan and the daily stormer. If Cloudflare would’ve stood by their word this whole thing would end here. However they did not and the way things went down are very strange.

The problem is the question of whether offering services to someone automatically makes you a supporter of whatever that someone is up to. Depending on what service it is this reasoning can make more or less sense. When someone hosts a website like Kiwi Farms the hosting company obviously plays an important role in allowing the site to operate. There are many such providers out there so switching to another one isn’t impossible but it makes things harder. It should therefore come as no surprise that Kiwi Farms has had to switch between many hosts in the past and ultimately found one that matches their requirements. There are other services necessary to host a site among them domain registrars, ISPs, certificate authorities and Internet address registries just to name a few of them. If you run a normal website you’ll hardly have to worry about this kind of stuff, but in the case of the Farms you eventually get forced into finding out about the more integrate parts of the Internet.

Enough technical jargon for now. Cloudflare issued another statement on the third of September which was a Saturday. While I’m not one to tell Matthew Prince when to end his work week it does seem a bit strange to issue a statement on a weekend. This post was also only written by him unlike their previous statement which was co-authored by Alissa Starzak. The initial statement also never mentioned Kiwi Farms, but rather just clarified that they do not want to revoke services based on outside pressure and what kinds of services they offer. If you want you can read the entire statement here. The summary is that Cloudflare still stands by the values that they explained in the previous post but that they would make an exception for Kiwi Farms as the “users of the site became more aggressive” and “the rhetoric on on the [..] site [escalated]”. Ultimately they mention some nebulous “potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life” which were posted on the site. There is no further explanation for this. One could speculate as to why that is and about what actually happened, and unless Cloudflare clears this up that’s all we have to go on.

Together with their statement Cloudflare immediately seized all domains that the Kiwi Farms used as well as some that are used by Null or Josh for some of his other projects. All of these domains then pointed to a static page that looked like this:

Once again there’s talk of this unknown threat and a link to their blog post. This is different from the last two times Cloudflare revoked their services. This happened immediately and with absolutely no communication to Joshua according to him. Apparently he has received no communication related to this incident in general. So either Cloudflare lied about their claim that they have “proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what [they] believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life” or these unknown threats turned out to be unsubstantiated. Throughout the post Prince tries to desperately justify this action while also claiming that Cloudflare stands by its values and that this action is definitely an exception and that they are not doing this directly because of the campaign to deplatform Kiwi Farms. The statement also basically indirectly implies that the Farms is worse than any other site that Cloudflare has offered services to in the past, which is quite a bold statement considering how many other sites they service. There is also no apparent vetting involved when using their free offer for DDoS protection so it’s hard to believe that there haven’t been worse sites using their service.

With all that covered we’re ultimately left with a few questions:

• What exactly were the threats that lead to this decision?
• Why did they require the action that was taken?
• Why do they require a permanent suspension of Kiwi Farms?
• Why was there absolutely no communication?
• Why was it necessary to hijack the domains?

We’ll probably never get real answers to these questions, at least not from Cloudflare, so all we have to go by is assumptions. The threats that they talked about can really only mean two things. The first one is a post made on 4chan, which already is ridiculous as that has nothing to do with Kiwi Farms, but the truth didn’t matter too much before and there’s only one other potential post that could qualify. The post that was made on 4chan shows a note held up in front of the building that Keffals moved to after leaving Canada. The place where Keffals moved was found out fairly quickly as there were enough leads to go by. The location was found by another site called doxbin. If anyone is still wondering what “website ZERO” refers to in Destiny’s substack post, that site is it. I’m don’t have much to say about it. I personally don’t think doxing is a good thing, but just like with Kiwi Farms this is apparently legal under U.S. law and even if it wasn’t doxbin is a fairly simple site compared to the Kiwi Farms so it can move to different hosts a lot easier and is therefore a lot more resilient. That might be one of the reasons why Keffals never even tried to go for that site. Anyways, as the name implies the site basically serves only one purpose and it’s therefore no surprise that this and more information on Keffals was posted there first. The note mentioned Kiwi Farms so that’s basically the only reason this even remotely qualifies as one of the potential threats, even though the text contains no threat besides maybe saying that Keffals should go “out of our community”. The entire note is written in a very strange way and seems to make fun of Kiwi Farms more than anything.

That really only leaves one possible candidate for the imminent threat to human life. This refers to a post made on Kiwi Farms which said the following

While this certainly is a threat, it’s not enough to warrant an entire site from being taken down. This post was made by an account that was inactive for two years. The account then made two meaningless posts because the first posts anyone makes have to be approved my moderators as far as I know and the threat they posted would’ve clearly not been approved. The post received exclusively negative ratings, was reported multiple times and ultimately deleted by the account that made it. The timeline of this incident is as follows:

• 3:42pm EDT The post is made
• 3:53pm EDT Keffals makes a screenshot of the post
• 3:55pm EDT Keffals posts the screenshot as a tweet
• 3:56pm EDT The post is deleted by the account that made it

That is some impeccable timing if you ask me. The post stayed up for 14 minutes and Keffals Tweets just short of it being deleted. Also the screenshot of the post shows it without any ratings, which means that whoever made the screenshot was looking at it for a while before taking the screenshot.

And that’s all folks. If you get the feeling that this isn’t really all that much you’re not wrong, but there’s nothing else that’s really a threat. If that were the case you can rest assured that Keffals or someone else hellbent on getting the Farms taken down would’ve tweeted about it.

Part 3: The Aftermath

There’s a lot more that could be said about this like for example all the things the Farms found out about Keffals, but most of it can either be found on the Kiwi Farms thread or in Destiny’s substack post.

This leaves the question of what happened afterwards. Since Null is so stubborn and apparently gets anxious when his site isn’t up he obviously got right back to work to get it up and running again. The first attempt used a Russian service for DDoS protection and a matching .ru TLD. Kiwi Farms has been using that service before, but didn’t need it as the .ru domain was not active for quite a while. The service they used was DDoS Guard, a company that is known to serve a lot of rather interesting customers. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. If you have to compete with Cloudflare which offers parts of their service for free in a market where there are few alternatives you’ll take whatever you can get. That is also true for websites who cannot choose Cloudflare. The company got some attention after they worked with Parler. It seems that the negative press had some effect on them as they cancelled services for Kiwi Farms very quickly. Their explanation was pretty useless as well:

As with Cloudflare they state that they do not moderate content and that law enforcement should deal with these issues just to then say that they take action themselves in this case. Apparently the actual reason was that there was a picture of Hitler looking like Santa Clause with the caption “Ho-ho-holocaust”. I guess they couldn’t use a threat to human life this time. Null then went on to try DiamWall, which is a new small company also providing DDoS protection, naturally they have nowhere near the capacity of Cloudflare. Immediately after Kiwi Farms started using DiamWall the twitter accounts of both DiamWall and the CEO were flooded with tweets demanding them to drop Kiwi Farms and accusing them of supporting terrorism and nazis. Once again they gave in to the pressure and issued a worthless statement. Null said that he apparently talked to them beforehand and had the impression that they were friendly people who want to protect free speech online. If you look at the other social media accounts of them you’ll see that the campaign is completely isolated to twitter. Neither their Facebook page nor their Instagram account received even so much as a single comment.

After dealing with all that the website was back up again on another domain which used a more complex setup to run the forum. Then one of the hosts that the forum uses was partially compromised, but this most likely had not impact on the site. The following day the site was hacked and the attacker deleted all sub forums, changed all user avatars to the logo of poa.st, which is an instance that is part of the fediverse, which Josh uses to post updates about the website. Finally the attacker tried to export all user records but failed as exporting over 120,000 entries crashed the server. As of today there is no indication that any user data was actually compromised. On top of all of that Null then had to leave for a week due to some family related reasons. Obviously this didn’t mean that things would stop. The site was down, but apparently that isn’t enough, Joshua apparently lost his Agent because of “ties to Russia” which once again is just a made up reason unless they are referring to the usage of DDoS Guard, which also doesn’t make much sense. Josh’s lawyer also called him at some point informing him that people where calling him about previous clients. The website was also removed from archive.org with no explanation. Archive.org usually removes sites because of personal requests. In that case you usually have to prove that you are the owner of the site that is to be removed, which I don’t have a problem with as long as the content removed isn’t relevant in any way. Otherwise people would try to remove archived posts they made that might be used as evidence. Lastly Null also lost his Google Voice number, which he was using to receive some important calls. Once again, no explanation.

This just goes to show how far some people are willing to go. People tried to intimidate Josh into closing the forums before at the beginning of 2017. Back then family members were apparently attacked to force him into surrendering to their demands. After doing so and taking the site offline the demands changed so the website went back up as he was not willing to comply anymore because that would’ve required him to hand over user data.

Following the hack and a week of absence he set everything up again and using different ways of mitigating DDoS attacks. This is basically the story so far. The site is back up and using a bunch distributed servers to route traffic. Simultaneously the campaign has basically come to a halt. That doesn’t mean that it’s over, but after Destiny released the substack post on Keffals it seems like people have finally realized who has been leading the campaign and taking thousands of dollars in donations without any breakdown on what they’ll be used for.

Part 4: The conclusion

So now that the site is back up and the campaign mostly stopped, why did I even write this? I am not an active user of the forum and probably never will be. I’m not too interested in what insanities random people on the Internet have been up to, but I also do not want a site to be forced offline like it has been tried with Kiwi Farms. If there is grounds to take it down then it should be handled in court with due process. This was never attempted in this case since this would’ve required someone to stick their neck out and put their money where their mouth is while also basically knowing that they’d have hardly a chance at winning. The Internet is also already way too centralized and confined to a select few services. For most people their usage is restricted to less than ten different sites which are offered by only a hand full of companies. Anyone who manages to run an independent community for as long as the Kiwi Farms already deserves more credit and respect than anyone that partook in the campaign to take it down. If more discussion and discourse would take place on independently hosted platforms the Internet would be a better place and also more resilient. Federation also shows how this would still allow different instances to be connected with others preventing things from becoming too isolated. If this was the norm a place like the Kiwi Farms would also have less insane people to discuss as they usually only thrive on the big centralized platforms.

Some things that weren’t even addressed here were the planned attempts to go after APNIC to have the IP addresses of Kiwi Farms revoked or how Nick Rekieta lost both his Twitter and Youtube account after covering some of this in his streams (He has since gotten his channel back again). After he had some stern words for Keffals people started filing ethics complaints against him in order to have his bar license revoked, which would mean that he wouldn’t be able practice law anymore. There’s more that could be talked about here, but the basic idea should come across.

Some final words

In an ideal world this entire thing wouldn’t have happened at all. The next best thing would be for Cloudflare to own up to their mistake and clear this situation up. The chance of them reinstating services for the forum is very slim so clarification is the next best thing to hope for, but I’m not very optimistic. The only silver lining is that the website is still operating, but it’s not feasible to ask every administrator to go through the amount of effort that Null goes through regularly to keep the site running. It really does seem as if something behind the scenes threatened these services into giving in. Some have speculated that the exclusion from using payment processors like Visa or Mastercard could be one of those threats.

As Josh has outlined in a substack post post the Internet is quite a brittle thing. There are a multitude of possible attack vectors that can bring any site down. The host, the certificate authority, upstream, content delivery systems and search engines, DNS, ISPs and payment processors. The EFF has also talked about this and they even addressed this when Cloudflare first dropped 8chan and the daily stormer. If you look at Kiwi Farms you’ll see that the site has already had issues at least with the following:

• Hosts (ghandi, vshield.pro)
• CDNs/DDoS protection (Cloudflare, DDoS-Guard, DiamWall)
• DNS (ClouDNS)
• Payment processors (Coinbase and probably some others)
• Search engines (Google)

Because of this Null recently made a list of services that he has used and still uses and his experience with them. So you could use that to help you decide if you are looking for similar services.

That’s basically all I had to say about this topic. Only time will tell how this will continue, but for now things seem to have quieted down a bit again.